Take a hike!

Fall is a great time to take a walk in the woods; no bugs, plenty of sunshine, and moderate temperatures.

Today I took a mid-afternoon break from reading and writing, writing and reading to venture up one of the leafy trails on Mount Wachusett. Warm temperatures lured many hikers (and their dogs!) outdoors to enjoy the clear blue skies and views from the summit. Saturday's rain courtesy of Hurricane Noel washed away the atmospheric haze and revealing Boston skyline, to the east and Mount Monadnock to the north. These days Wachusett draws thousands of visitors. The summit is accessible also accessible by car. One of the most famous people to walk up this "monadnock" was Henry David Thoreau. In 1843 Thoreau and a friend walked the distance from Concord to the summit to take in the vista. In a line from his essay "Walk to Wachusett," he writes, "From the foundation of a wooden observatory, which was formerly erected on the highest point, forming a rude hollow structure of stone, a dozen feet in diameter, and five or six in height, we could see Monadnock, in simple grandeur, in the northwest, rising nearly a thousand feet higher, still the far blue mountain." They camped overnight and ate wild blueberries and milk, and read Virgil and Wordsworth by the light of the moon. There is no camping now but the mountain trails are accessible throughout the year.

The Department of Conversation and Recreation (DCR) posts maps in pdf to state parks and reservations online. DCR offers a Wachusett Mountain Trail Map in a printable version or for more information on the regional history, geology, and advice on hiking, you can stop by the John Hitchcock Visitor Center

So hit the trail and enjoy autumn!
Clair



Photo: Monadnock from Wachusett

CTL Announces Faculty Recipients of AY 07-08 Innovation Grants

The advisory board of the Center for Teaching and Learning has met to select the awardees for our annual Innovation Grants. This year the Center had four grants, each valued at $1,000; there were two team proposals, and the awardees came from a variety of disciplines.

To view the proposal abstracts from the awardees, please visit our Faculty Stories page.

Congratulations to all the awardees.

Clair

p. s. Stay tuned for upcoming podcasts with faculty innovators.

Are you a Wrimo?

FSC Librarian Sara Marks and English major Sariah Armstrong have made the front page for their role as municipal liaisons in the annual NaNoWriMo project. To read more about Sara and Sariah and the November novel writing phenomenon, click Ready, set, write.

Congratulations to our CTL neighbors. Keep us posted on your progress.

Clair

Introduction to Classroom Response Systems

Welcome to our brownbag hands-on session to "clicker" technology! A group of faculty (Sara Marks, Sara Levine, Meg Hines, Chris Picone, Claire McAndrew, Andrienne Clark, Bornali Bhandari, John Chetro-Szivos, and Tom Schoenfeld) and librarians are gathered in the CTL to discuss the use of a technology that gathers data in the classroom. Tom Schoenfeld passed out a chart entitled "CRS/PRS Competitive Landscape" that he compiled to compare the major vendors.

Sara Levine has been using iClicker within a classroom setting. She mentioned that the Interwrite system is more sophisticated.

Tom has been utilizing Interwrite PRS (Personal Response System) with 100 students within a lecture hall. The system is set up with the gradebook from Blackboard and uses the student ID to associate the each clicker with a student. Tom is now offering extra credit for student participation. Student participation is approximately 60 - 70 percent, and he is hoping that the extra credit will provide an incentive to use the response system.

The CTL purchased the Interwrite PRS system with 32 clickers to utilize and test with our librarians (Sara Marks and Meg Hines). Just a note, Interwrite does offer the ability to make questions and responses anonymous.

Chris Picone mentioned that he is using a Blackboard survey tool to capture student responses; however, students would need to have their laptops charged up and ready throughout the class.

Sara Levine mentioned that the research on CRS/PRS increases student involvement but the research on student learning is not conclusive.

Chris asked about battery life. When the battery dies, do you lose all the student information on the device? Sara L. mentioned that Interwrite advertises that battery life is estimated at two years.

Sara M. mentioned that the system offers out a Master Remote but this has been difficult to configure.

In the spirit of the season, Sara M. created a Halloween demo session. She walked us through the Interwrite system by creating a "New Class" in the control software. Question design options included multiple choice, numeric, short answer, true/false, and survey. Tom uses the survey tool to find out the distribution of majors within the class.

As part of the demonstration, Sara handed out clickers and created six questions, one question of each type. "Students" then turned on their remotes and she started DemoLesson. Sara then talked each "student" through activating the remotes. As students joined the group, the software logged the students. Sara then started the questions and students entered their responses. Interwrite displays the answers and creates a graph. Questions are timed and if students need more time, you can adjust the time given for the question.

When the quiz or survey is complete, the instructor can now go back into the results and review the session.

During the discussion, Chris mentioned the difficulty of accessing the data in Blackboard. The professor has to navigate through multiple screens to display it. Sara L. mentioned that this technology might be useful for psychology students for evaluating data. Tom mentioned that there is a homework setting. He plans to set up questions on the handout, and students will enter answers while doing the assignment. During the next class, students will then upload their responses to the system.

Do you have a question or idea? Post a comment and join our discussion.


Clair
PS Please note that a few changes have been made to this post to include the term PRS and Personal Response System. The request to make the changes came via email message from a public relations firm.

Stories told & retold (with a bit of magic)

Michael Hoberman’s students are telling stories, and now they can be retold again and yet again, with a just a wee bit of audio magic. So, how did he and his students accomplish this bit of technological wizardry? Well, truth be told, the technological aspects were quite easy to master, and the real magic is focused on the telling of the stories.

So, how did this project begin? On a dark and stormy Wednesday, Michael called into the CTL with a challenge. He wondered if there were an easy method to record his students and make the audio files available for listening. I took the request, and after a bit of thought and a quick conversation with Sean, we conjured up a plan to help make this happen.

We determined that we would just three things: a laptop (got it, Michael), a microphone (need it, borrowed from Mike Leamy), and the Audacity audio editing software (needed it, but downloaded from Sourceforge). By Thursday Michael and I were able to meet for fifteen minutes in the Center to set up the software and run a quick audio capture test. (Open Audacity, select start button to record and stop button when done recording. It's that easy!) With the recording process established, the last step would be the conversion to mp3 and the upload to Blackboard. We waited until the next week for that.

Intrigued? Want to know what happened next? Of course, our story has a happy ending, but you will have to wait for the next installment in our series of “Stories told & retold (with a bit of magic).”

Clair

Anniversaries and Eateries in Central Mass

This weekend Rebecca and I celebrated our 6th wedding anniversary. Now, anyone who has been to one of our parties knows we're foodies, but it's become something of a tradition on our anniversary to seek out new and interesting places. If you're like us and not from Central Mass, then you have to get everything by word of mouth, and sometimes this is like pulling the proverbial tooth; perhaps everyone's afraid of giving foreigners (I'm from Texas, and she's from Alaska) the inside scoop on the "dishy" restaurants. Thus, I thought it might be helpful to have a short list of places we've been to or hope to go to:

Last night we traveled a short distance to Aylmer's Grille in Jaffrey, NH. The wine list was short, but stocked with solid choices. On the recommendation of Rebecca's brother, we tried a red new to both of us: 7 Deadly Zins, from Michael~David Wineries in Lodi, CA. The nose was almost overpowering (Rebecca adds that it was "big with a lot of 'jam' in it"), but the attack was anything but overwhelming, and the follow through was excellent, especially if you're having red meat. In the event it worked out well for both of us; for an entrée Rebecca had the evening's special, surf-'n-turf, and I had the beef tenderloin medallions; note to self: avoid the "surf" when this far inland. Both appetizers -- a wild mushroom ragout and the bread with kalamata tapenade in basil olive oil -- were a bit on the salty side, but delicious nevertheless. Desert was a chocolate mousse, followed by a lengthy digestion and a brisk walk outdoors. In all, the service was good, and the tempo was relaxed; a very nice experience.

Previous anniversaries and nights out have taken us to Sonoma in Princeton, MA and Luca's Mediterranean Café in Keene, NH, as well as Acquo Bistro in Peterborough, NH, and the good ol' standby, The Monument Grill, in Leominster, MA. We've also heard good things about The Inn at Jaffrey Center and the Fitzwilliam Inn restaurant (NH), as well the 111 Chop House (Worcester, MA), which is run by the same folks who own the Sole Proprietor (also in Worcester).

By the way, if you're looking for an excellent wine shop in the Fitchburg-Leominster area, you've got to go to Kappy's Fine Wine and Spirits (near the Kmart, at 1 South Street). The new wine steward is from the main Boston branch of Kappy's, and thus far he hasn't given us a bad recommendation.


Cheers,
Sean

Adobe Acrobat: Old Technology, but New Features

On 18 October, the Center hosted a technology demo by Adobe representative, Ali Hanyaloglu, who showed us the wonders of Adobe Acrobat Professional. We'll be posting a podcast of his presentation in the Idea Center this next week, but in the meantime you'll probably want to go to their website and view the demo for Acrobat Pro. I think you'll be surprised by all the new features.

Not only has Acrobat become more like MS Word (in its annotation and highlighting features), but it's also become more collaborative in the bargain. For that matter, like many instructional technologies (e.g., Smarttech's "Notebook" software that goes with their SmartBoards), Acrobat has become a "content management" system, rivalling traditional and much, much more costly learning management systems (LMS). Indeed, the likes of Blackboard and WebCT might become obsolete with these new lower-cost solutions.

As a side note, I should say that I inquired about LMS solutions when attending the Nelinet "Web 2.0" conference at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. The (admittedly one) Olin student I spoke with suggested that the student body rebelled when presented with Blackboard as the College's LMS solution. Now, I didn't verify the claim, but it does suggest how outdated BB has become; when some of the nation's top engineering students find it cumbersome, confining, and clunky, companies like BB should sit up and take notice. Technology moves at a fast pace, and today's monopoly will become tomorrow's dinosaur.


Cheers,
Sean